Active Member

I have a slight problem,ive just connected my HCPC (in my office) to my plasma (in Living room) by a VGA lead the problem now is that I have to change leads over every time i want to use the pc in the office,my pc has the VGA output and another output that says monitor but is a different type of plug,the guys at my local pc world were as usual clueless to help,any suggestions how i can get around this surely anyone who runs 2 screens will have come up against this ?

Active Member

Do you know what sort of graphics card it is ? That second plug could be a DVI connection (is it white, whereas the vga is blue ?), which just requires a little (and cheap VGA to DVI converter to let you use it as a second VGA connection.

Banned

The other port on the back of your graphics card is most likely a DVI port (a good way to tell is the white plastic insert on the port). The standard 15pin VGA port is has a blue plastic insert.

Anyway, what you need to display graphics on both displays is a DVI to VGA convertor, which goes on the DVI connector and then inturn you plug the plasma display into this convertor.

You will also need to setup your graphics driver to use a dual monitor configuration and clone the 1st display (your monitor) to the 2nd (the plasma). With this done you will now be seeing two identical images from the computer.

Also note that the plasma is very unlikely to be able to support much higher resolution than 800x600. So unless you have your main monitor set at this resolution, your plasma will resort to the virtual desktop, whereby you will have 'scroll' around to see the entire picture. This isn't relevant for video as that is overlayed as full screen.

Active Member

The port is as you have described so I will go and have a look in my local maplin and pc world to try and track down this converter plug i need,I must admit i did think I could do thay but my local pc world whom i bought it from said i couldnt (that said i wouldnt trust a thing they say with the problems ive had with them! ive found the settings for the cloned monitor so should be ok now thanks alot guys,the graphics card is a Nvida F-force FX by the way